Do Americans Love Their Children Too?
- Augustine Wasef
- Jan 19
- 2 min read
Updated: Jan 24
By Augustine Wasef
In 1985 the musician Sting objected to the Cold War by asking the question: Do Russians love their children too? Forty years later, I ask Americans the same.
For thousands of years we have tried to codify ethics into mathematical utilitarianism, as if we could find a formula for innate desire. The underlying issue is that human ethics fundamentally require a kind of logical inversion. It is not sane to enter a warzone only to deliver aid. We do it anyway.
We are still trying to explain human morality through artificial intelligence. Human ethics are not coherent, neither are machine ethics. But only one will care for the marginalized.
It is a statistical improbability going on a miracle that I am a writer. Physics was a psychedelic fever dream irresistible in its intensity. But I still had to loosely follow the outside landscape as if monitoring the bedrock. I am 14. From this novel vantage point I observe a society failing the simplest moral objectives.
I anticipated change and every year nothing happened. Time has betrayed the futility of activism. Forty centuries ago people died of hunger. Forty centuries later people die of hunger. In forty centuries people will die of hunger. This realization metamorphosed me into a writer. Every sentence is directed towards a singular goal: disprove the cold utility of our modern perspective.
The Oasis song “Wonderwall” speaks of an imaginary figure who saves you from yourself. Society can no longer wait. We will not listen to the collective call amplified by science and fortified by religion while chasing abstract profit. We sold a planet and its children. Maybe our guilt will gradually transfigure itself into a new impetus for change.
And yet I am so clearly naive. I am asking for a future that will never happen. A future where we protect the vulnerable and build a better society, not out of the protest of the downtrodden but of our conscience.
Until that time I will continue to ask if Americans love their children too.
Thank you for choosing Inflection Magazine and human authorship.
Image Credit: Eugene Golovesov/Unsplash
The entirety of this writing could be encapsulated as a call to action crossed with a desperate, hopeless plea. However to even assume this stance, and subsequently write it is the same as the very tragedy lamented. How can you complain about the indifference when really writing about it is the same as fueling it. What does writing about it produce, simply a sense of familiarity with the issue, distilled in the mind of the reader. And yet even the writer falls prey to this, as they simply delude themselves into the belief of contributing. If this is to be interpreted as a plea then what even is the point. It is written as though a moral complaint about th…
how does this have any correlation to your title